My passions as a privileged to stay-at-home mom of 4, who is approaching mid-life, are for preserving the basic skills of home life. My hobbies and interests are aspects of gardening, cooking from a basic pantry of items, quilting, organizing my home, reading mysteries, family history, and recently homeschooling my 6th and 3rd graders. I’m certainly far from perfect in all these pursuits, but I hope you will join me on my journey to educating myself and others around me in the basics of home.

My early childhood memories are of watching Little House on the Prairie on TV, helping my mother preserve our piles of freshly picked green beans in jars to eat the next year, picking peaches at an orchard to can, jumpers and matching skirts sewn by my mother, homemade wheat bread (which I didn’t like at the time), and my mom able to open the cupboards and come up with a meal in a matter of minutes. As a teenager I thought it was so old-fashioned and my mom needed to ‘get with the times’. Whether it was because my mom was so busy with the other 5 children and a daycare, or because she went to work out of the home in my later teen years, for some reason a good foundation in those basic skills did not get passed on to me while I was living at home.

What did get passed on to me was a taste of the basics. Now as a grown woman with all the responsibilities of a husband, children, and a home to maintain, even though I don’t have a lot of time to myself, I find that what I do enjoy doing is educating myself and putting into practice the basic skills of home. I’m teaching myself to be a self-reliant woman in an age where we depend upon so many modern technologies that if one fails, most people would be lost as to what to do. I feel inspired to educate not only myself, but also my children so that these essential skills will not be lost to future generations.